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Want to recreate your grandmother's flowery tablecloth or put your own spin on a classic Alexander Girard print? Head to Spoonflower, a website that allows users to print their own designs on fabric. Launched last year out of an old sock mill in Mebane, North Carolina, the site has rapidly attracted a crafty fan base of 15,000 users. The process is simple: upload a file (JPG, TIF, or PNG), select from multiple placement options, and check out. Prices range from $5.00 for an 8" x 8" swatch to $32.00 per yard of upholstery-weight cotton sateen, and designs are printed (using eco-friendly, non-toxic pigment inks) within five business days. Textile design veterans and amateurs alike can enter the Fabric of the Week contest, which is voted on by Spoonflower users. Winning designs are offered for sale as limited-edition fabrics at Spoonflower's Etsy shop.

Sure, UnBeige is published online, but we actually compose all of our posts on a pair of candy apple red Olivetti typewriters before turning them over to Eero, our technology-savvy web monkey, who somehow beams them into cyberspace (he also handles all of our links). Now Eero tells us that UnBeige and the rest of the mediabistro.com blog family have joined the future with mobile-optimized sites that are easily browsable on your iPhone, Blackberry, or Palm. Should you routinely carry one of these devices on your person, you need only type unbeige.com into the browser to be automatically redirected to our mobile-friendly page. The mobile optimizations are in beta, notes Eero, so if you have any problems reading UnBeige on the go, please drop us an e-mail.

A new online database promises to help designers avoid cases of mistaken identity. The Identity Archives Project (IdAP) aims to be "the most complete online keyword-searchable database of logos and brand identity designs from around the world." Developed by San Francisco graphic designer Gabe Ruane, IdAP is a free resource that relies upon the contributions of designers and branding gurus. Active or antiquated logos, logotypes, icons, brand identities, brand marks, and corporate identities are all fair game, providing that they were approved by the client, have been used publicly, and are submitted by their creators. The key, however, is in the keywords, on which the value—and searchability—of the database will depend. Ruane advises those submitting designs to consider subjective and conceptual aspects, including the emotions a logo conveys, whether it's masculine or feminine, and what it represents. "Don't hold back!" He notes on the site. "The more info you can associate with the logo design, the better!"

Following in the sponsored tire tracks of artist Robin Rhode, who recently used a BMW Z4 as a 300-horsepower paintbrush, Brussels-based graphic designers Pierre Smeets and Damien Aresta have created a typeface using an iQ (pictured at right), Toyota's answer to the Smart Car. Smeets and Aresta teamed up with interactive artist Zach Lieberman and seasoned racecar driver Stef Vancampenhoudt to trace and digitally map letters and characters on the floor of an airplane hangar (watch the design process in the below video). The result is iQ Agility, a Eurojaunty typeface that reveals the iQ's incredibly tiny turning radius.

Next up for Smeets and Aresta? The pair are at work on a typeface inspired by the title sequence of Antonioni's Eclipse and another one for a club. In the meantime, they have a ongoing project to spot first names—from Adam to Zorba—in commercial signage. Both Stephanie and Steve remain elusive, but check if they've found your name here.

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Polaroid's decision last year to discontinue its instant photography products has led to more than widespread film hoarding. We've also detected a swell of nostalgia for the distinctive look of the company's photos, tucked inside their invariable white frames and immune to the magic of Photoshop. Even the digital realm that sped the death of instant photography is getting into the act, with a range of standalone tools that allow users to "Polaroidize" any photo. We like Poladroid, an easy-to-use application that transforms digital photos into high-resolution pseudoPolaroids. The program comes complete with Polaroid sound effects and quirks: sessions are limited to ten images (just like a Polaroid film cassette), virtually shaking the photos seems to hasten their development, and the resulting images contain "random and realistic Polaroid-like color variation." Picture imperfect.

(Poladroid photo by Flickr user bawtrees)

Recently on UnBeige:

With sales down nearly 30% in the last quarter, Herman Miller is busy restructuring, consolidating its manufacturing operations, and...diversifying beyond furnishings. The company best known for industrial design classics of yesterday (by the likes of George Nelson and Charles and Ray Eames) and today (Don Chadwick and Bill Stumpf's Aeron chair) is focused on a new product that you won't be able to see, let alone sit on: Convia, a high-tech wiring system that allows offices, restaurants, and stores to integrate power delivery and save big on electric bills. Developed in consultation with Applied Minds as part of Herman Miller's initiative to explore new lines of business in the wake of the 2001 recession, Convia aims to make traditionally rigid electrical infrastructure flexible. Mina Kimes explains how it works in the current issue of Fortune:

Normally, if an office manager wants to split, say, a conference room into two offices, he has to rip out the walls and hire an electrician to put in new wiring so that each office can control its own lighting. With Convia, the wires running through walls or cubicles are "smart," so no electrician is necessary, just install a switch and point a wand at every lighting fixture you want the switch to control. In a flash the room is divided into two separate circuits.

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Visionary architect Le Corbusier preferred drawing to talking. "Drawing is faster," he said. "And leaves less room for lies." Meanwhile, lies for rooms could be minimized by adhering to his prescribed color palettes, selected to complement or contrast with purist white or natural materials. You can bring Le Corbu home with you thanks to kt.COLOR. The Swiss specialty paint manufacturer that brought you Yves Klein blue in a can also produces handmade paints in 63 colors licensed from Fondation le Corbusier. There are two palettes to choose from: LC 32 is a collection of 43 pastels from the monochrome Salubra wallpaper collection of 1930 and LC 43 is a powerful pack of 20 colors introduced in the 1950s to play off materials including lime plaster, raw concrete, and wood. If the prospect of Veronese Green and Bright Orange is too overwhelming, fear not. Kt.color also offers a collection of 17 "Variations on White."

Here at UnBeige, we love it when good design meets social good, and so the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project is of enduring interest, whether its news of Yves Behar scooping up awards for the laptop's design or listening to Mary Lou Jepsen, OLPC's founding chief technology officer and now head of Pixel Qi, hold forth on how to create green gadgets ("design for the bottom of the pyramid"). If you're a little foggy on the project's particulars—and even if you're not—we recommend the below TED video. Filmed earlier this month, it features MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte discussing the project as he voyages to Colombia and delivers laptops inside territory once controlled by guerrillas. How's the project going? "In rough numbers, there are about a million laptops" in the hands of children around the world or en route to them, says Negroponte. "That's smaller than I predicted—I predicted three [million] to ten million—but it is still a very large number."

Previously on UnBeige:

If you're like us, you find your cell phone's immutable display typeface blocky and depressing. Maybe it's time to move to England! There you can avail yourself of FlipFont, a new service that offers downloadable, mobile-optimized fonts to replace the factory-installed default that kills your design mojo. Developed by Monotype Imaging (the company behind fonts.com, among other font-related offerings), FlipFont is currently available only on select cell phones serviced by Vodafone UK, but the goal is to expand the service to operating systems and service providers worldwide.

"Users have tried to change their phone font and have 'broken' their phone in the process, so we've collaborated with Vodafone UK to ensure FlipFont is safe, fun, and easy to use," said Monotype Imaging marketing director Julie Strawson in a press release issued today. The service launches with a menu of ten scalable fonts, ranging from Dennis Pasternak's ITC Stylus (based on freehand architectural lettering) to the robust Musclehead. Prices start at £1.99 (about $3.19 at current exchange rates) per font. For those inclined to typographical restlessness, FlipFont includes a utility that allows customers to 'flip' to use a different font, or access additional fonts that can be previewed, licensed, and downloaded. AT&T, jump on this!

A mildly peeved-looking rabbit known as The Stanford Bunny (pictured above, in various incarnations) is a widely used test model for graphics research. Other popular test images include those of a monkey face, a grizzly bear sunning himself on a rock, a teapot, and 1973 Playboy Playmate Lena Sjooblom. The lot of them have long fascinated New York artist Kevin Zucker and are the subject of his recent guest essay on Paddy Johnson's blog, Art Fag City. Zucker focuses on 20 archetypal images that he describes as "representative highlights that I think epitomize the inscrutability, banality, anachronism, and the straightforwardly artless presentation that characterize most of the collection. Those qualities, contrasted with the weird aura possessed by these analog 'originals' of digital representation, make for the unsteady balance of gravity and absurdity that first got me interested in collecting them." This is an unsettling coffee table waiting to happen. As for that iconic rabbit, Zucker reveals its origins. "Greg Turk, who 3D-scanned the Stanford Bunny in 1994, bought it from a local Palo Alto home and garden supply store because the terra cotta material was 'red and diffuse' and its geometry was not particularly complex."